


Deck the Halls

by Corycides



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: A Very Charloe Christmas 2015, F/M, May have taken liberties with the timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-08 01:12:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5477570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corycides/pseuds/Corycides
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spending Christmas with Sebastian Monroe wasn't exactly Charlie's idea of a good time. Well, not unless he was stuffed head-first UP the chimney. Since that appeared to what she was stuck with this year, though, she was determined to make the best of it. </p><p>Even if enjoying Monroe's company - just a bit - made her feel weird.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sarahliz1925](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahliz1925/gifts).



It turned out that the war with the Republic - the death, the blood, the running, the killing - had all been a waste of time. All they’d really needed to do was wait for winter and General Monroe would have packed up the war and gone home to warm his toes by the fire.

‘Fucking snow,’ Monroe growled, stomping through the camp. He was wearing a hoodie and a leather jacket, fingerless gloves he’d stripped from a corpse keeping his hands warm. Warmish. ‘Fucking Dakota.’

Charlie pulled her boots on. They were still wet from the day before, and the day before that. She rolled up the sleeping bag, twisting two bungee cords around it, and crawled out from under the cart Uninterested in dealing with Monroe’s early morning bitching on an empty stomach, she tossed the bag into the the back of the cart and checked on the horse. It had most of the blankets, and snorted wet, warm breath over her hands as she fed a lump of sticky, grey sugar.

‘It’s going to take us an extra fucking week to get to Willoughby,’ Monroe grouched, kicking the wet remains of the fire to pieces under the snow. ‘At this rate, the bounty hunters will have cut Miles’ throat already.’

After over a month on the road with Monroe, Charlie was starting to understand why Miles was so taciturn. Monroe talked a lot. Sometimes - usually - it was easier to just let him get all the hot air out before you tried to chip in.

‘If you hate the cold so much, why make Philadelphia your base?’ she asked.

He gave her a sour look. ‘Why do you think I always had my eye on Georgia?’

‘Because it wasn’t a shit hole like the Republic?’ Charlie said. He had the gall to look offended. ‘They had buses, Monroe, and coffee shops. I had a cake pop. The only thing that pops in the Republic is cheap ammo and your knees.’

He ignored the jibe. ‘Is that what Miles told you?’

‘It’s what I saw.’

‘Yeah, well, trust me, roses don’t grow without shit, Charlie.’ It still threw her when he called her Charlie instead of Charlotte. Her name just sounded weird coming from General Monroe’s mouth. Of course, everything he said sounded weird. At some point he’d gone from the measured cadences of speeches to just sounding like a person. ‘Foster and I clashed over boundary lines, not ideology.’

She wiped down the harness, drying the leather on the tail of her shirt.

‘Don’t suppose it matters now,’ she said. ‘They’re both gone.’

‘Yeah, but Foster’s dead and I’m not,’ Monroe said, cracking a sardonic grin at her. ‘I guess that means I win.’

‘Not dead yet,’ Charlie said. ‘Don’t forget the yet, Monroe. That’s what gets me up in the mornings.’

He tossed their shared cup at her. She grabbed it out of the air just before it bounced off her face. ‘Don’t forget that I can tell Miles that I found him on my own,’ Monroe said. ‘Charlotte? No, not seen hide nor hair of her.’

Whatever morning amity they’d mustered had run out. They finished harnessing the cart in tight silence and boosted themselves up onto the seat. Monroe wrapped the reins around his gloved hands and cracked them, making the horse snort and throw itself against the traces. The cart’s metal-shod wheels dragged and creaked against the heavy frozen snow as it started moving.

Despite the snow it was a beautiful, clear morning, the sky as blue and free of conscience as Monroe’s eyes. By noon, the sky was full of low-hanging, dust-grey clouds and Charlie could feel the damp chill in her teeth. The wind had picked up, rattling the trees to the side of the road and rocking the cart.

‘Monroe,’ she said, yelling over the wind. ‘We need to find shelter. It’s going to be a bad storm.’

He looked up at the clouds and scowled. ‘It’ll blow over.’

‘Blow us over,’ Charlie muttered. ‘Come on, Monroe. We’re not going to be any good to Miles if we get frozen to death.’

‘Fucking snow,’ he muttered, then cracked the reins hard against the horse’s rump to jolt it into a run. ‘Fine. We’ll find shelter and start out again tomorrow.’

Whether it was the wind, or the snow, neither Charlie nor Monroe saw the tripwire strung across the road until it was too late. It caught the horse across the shins, snapping them with a brutal, stick-crack noise that Charlie heard even over the wind. The animal pitched forwards with a shriek, fouling itself in the traces, and the cart jolted over a rock and pitched to the side.

Charlie yelped as she saw the ground coming for her, throwing up her arm in an automatic attempt to break her fall. Before the impact, Monroe grabbed her shoulder and dragged her up onto his lap, twisting his body to take the impact against his back. He grunted as he landed, his arms tightening around her, and then the cart rolled over them. It cracked and splintered against the ground, coming apart around them.

‘Some son of a bitch has picked the wrong day to fuck with me,’ he growled against her throat.

He rolled off her, coming up off the ground and drawing his sword in one smooth movement. He gutted the first bandit who came lunging out of the trees, opening the man’s stomach from hipbone to sternum. Intestines bulged and the man screamed, wrapping his arms around his guts to try and hold them in.

Charlie scrambled to her feet and drew her sword, putting herself at Monroe’s back with grim determination. They didn’t fight well together. Both of them were used to fighting with Miles, they jarred and bumped against each other like they couldn’t get in time. It didn’t matter. All they had to do was survive until they got to Texas, then they’d never have to care if the other died spitting blood again.

The five bandits were skinny and ragged, with the terror of winter stark in their eyes. Winter was hard on the Plains. Charlie could sympathise, but she killed them anyhow.

Monroe got in the way of her elbow, grunting in irritation at her still not being Miles. Charlie resisted the urge to trip him, and opened the big artery in one of the raider’s legs instead. The bloom of blood against his jeans was dark and wet, and Charlie felt the hollow wrench of Maggie’s death again.

The falter got her a punch to the side of the face from a hilt-weighted fist, splitting her eyebrow and dribbling blood in her eye. There were three bandits left, three and a half if you counted the man with blood pissing down his suddenly nerveless leg.

It didn’t take long to finish them, Monroe wasting a bullet to take down the one who’d run. The raider pitched face down in the snow, arms out like he was making snow angels.

‘Shit,’ Monroe said.

The horse was dead, the cart was broken, and the wind had picked up enough that Charlie had to brace herself to stand upright. She spat hair out of her mouth, shoving it back from her face with the back of her arm.

‘They might have had a horse,’ she said. ‘And they had to have had shelter.’

‘Not our only problem,’ Monroe said, voice strained.

Charlie turned to see what he was talking about, and swore. A broken spar from the cart stuck out of Monroe’s thigh, his jeans black and wet with the ooze of blood. He was leaning over, sword still clenched in one hand while the other gripped his leg. His fingers dug into the meat of muscle over the injury.

‘Shit,’ Charlie said.

 

It would have been easier if Monroe had just leaned on Charlie. Instead he staggered and swore, the arm slung over her shoulder alternatively clenching tighter and shoving her away. His breath was hot and laboured against her throat. Charlie hooked her arm around his waist, fingers hooked around his weapon’s belt, and dragged him up the low, long steps into the shabby, listing collection of wooden buildings.

‘Who’d build a town out here?’ she asked. The door to the cabin was warped, scraping through a groove in the floor as she shouldered it open. Inside stank of old sweat and misery. ‘There’s nothing for miles, couldn’t have been even before the Blackout.’

Monroe lurched over the threshold, dragging his injured leg. ‘Glamping,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘People that never had to camp, and didn’t want to camp, going camping. Goddamnit.’

He half-fell, half-sat on the bed, his leg stuck out an awkward angle in front of him. Charlie’s shirt was tied around the injury, wadded around the wound and knotted tightly enough that she knew she needed to get it off soon.

‘Go back to the road, Matheson,’ he told her, voice dropping back into the confident rasp of command that made her want to punch him. ‘You’ll need to cover the corpses up, before someone comes looking for loot. It-’

‘Shut up,’ she told him, dumping both packs off her other shoulder with a grunt of relief. ‘That can wait till I’ve looked at your leg.’

He sneered at her. ‘Your sudden concern for my well-being is touching, Charlotte, but kissing me better can wait.’

Charlie ignored him, stripping off her jacket and crouching down to hunt the first aid kit out of her pack. The cold air felt good on her skin at first, cooling the sticky layer of sweat, but it quickly sunk down towards her bones.

‘You smell bad enough without your leg rotting off,’ Charlie told him, finally finding the kit wrapped up in her spare pair of jeans to protect it from knocks. He growled uncooperatively at her, gingerly hoisting his leg up onto the soiled bedding. The small lift made his face go greyish, colour draining away from around his mouth. Charlie rolled her eyes at him. ‘Look, I’m not going to enjoy this either. So just hang your crazy up for an hour and let me patch you up, General? The sooner you co-operate, the sooner we’ll be finished.’

He snorted, ‘That’s usually my line.’

Charlie wrinkled her nose. ‘Well, that’s a disturbing insight into your sex life.’

He laughed, then grimaced himself back into silence as he jarred his leg. Fresh blood seeped out of the denim, and Charlie remembered Maggie again. She was a bit surprised to realise that she didn’t want to see Monroe die. It wouldn’t break her heart, but it wouldn’t make her day either.

When had that happened?

Guilt pinched - for Danny, for Dad - but she swallowed it as she sat down on the edge of the bed. Monroe’s corpse wouldn’t make anything better, and besides - he’d saved her life, and she thought that would have earned him forgiveness from her dead.

She still bit back an apology for hurting him when she yanked the splinter out of his leg. It was jagged and raw, but it didn’t look filthy and it hadn’t gone as deep as she thought.

‘I don’t think it’s too bad,’ she said, blotting up the fresh blood with her t-shirt. ‘Couple of days and you’ll be back on your feet.’

‘I told you that,’ he groused. ‘Stop fussing, Charlie. I’m not your brother, I don’t need taken care of.’

Charlie faltered, that little bit of cruelty catching her by surprise. She tried - fairly hard - not to be rough as she gave the injury one last swab with the ruined shirt.

‘Asshole,’ she said.

Something a bit like shame cast its shadow over Monroe’s face. Charlie wondered for a horrible second if he was going to apologise to her. She’d no idea what she’d do with that, and she didn’t think he did either. Thankfully, it passed without comment.

‘Charlie, I will steal a lot of shit from the dead,’ Monroe said. ‘I draw the line at underwear.’

That wasn't a surprise. Charlie hadn't really thought about it before, but there was a shrug in her brain that accepted that fact with an ‘of course’. If he’d just dropped his jeans and not commented on it, neither would she.

Now that he had...it made it awkward in some weird way. The same feeling she’d had when he’d clenched his jaw and not looked at her when she’d been getting her shoulder patched up in the pool. It was like he’d gone from being an enemy/soldier to being a man, who had a dick and looked at her sometimes like she was beautiful.

Usually at weird times, admittedly, like after she’d killed someone or when she’d punched him for being an asshole.

And maybe she sometimes looked at him. Maybe. He wasn't an easy man to have simple feelings about.

‘Just put a pillow over it,’ she said, looking away pointedly. Out of the corner of her eye she could still see him work his belt lose and shove his jeans down over lean legs. He made a low, rough sound of gritted back pain as the rough fabric scraped his leg.

He didn't bother with a pillow, just hitched his hip up and wrenched a corner of the sheet out to drape over his groin. Charlie couldn't help but look. The tattered, worn thin cotton didn't actually hide much.

The half bottle of whiskey wasn't officially part of the first aid kit, but it always came in handy. Charlie splashed a slug of it over Monroe’s leg, his muscles clenching as the liquid stung, and then passed him the bottle.

Charlie stitched the wound up, practice keeping her hands steady despite her nerviness, and bandaged it up with bleach-white strips of linen. She was very aware of the hair-rough warmth of his hard thigh under her hand, the way his body tightened when she touched him, and the way he watched her.

The sheet really didn’t hide anything.

‘Is...this...something we need to deal with?’ she asked, taking her hands off him and wiping them on her jeans. She kept him in her peripheral vision, as if actually making eye contact would commit her to something.

Monroe took a searing gulp of cheap whiskey, hissing through the harsh reek of it hitting his throat. ‘I fucking hope not,’ he said, passing her the bottle. ‘You’re a pretty girl, and I’ve got a hard on. It’s not going to kill me to take care of it myself.’

Charlie couldn’t help herself, she glanced from the heavy lift of Monroe’s cock under the sheet to his sword-callused, otherwise elegant hands. The idea of his hand shackled around his cock, the hard, sweat-wet clench of his stomach, and the rasp of his breathing, made Charlie flush and squeeze her thighs together.

‘Shame,’ she said, swigging the whiskey. ‘That’s a legacy for the text books.’

She left the whiskey next to the bed for Monroe and made a quick retreat out of the cabin, into the skirling storm. The snow cooled her hot skin, but did nothing to shift the irritating awareness that had taken root in her brain.

It was also going to keep them trapped here till it passed.

‘Fucking snow,’ she muttered sourly, trudging through the skin of frost back towards the road.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

  
  


Monroe lay on a bandit’s sour, stained sheets and jacked off with perfunctory thoroughness, wringing his cock with an impatient hand and his surefire get-off fantasy. His thigh ached, pulsing from his groin to his knee, and his temper was a sour knot lodged somewhere between his gut and chest. It was a physical need to sate before Charlie got back, not something to linger over.

He leaned back against the wall, back of his skull resting against the cracked plaster, and stared at the sagging ceiling while he imagined small, practical hands around him and Charlie biting her lip in focused concentration. It was the expression she wore when cleaning her gun, but he figured that getting him off would be just as important to her.

In this fantasy anyhow.

There were others. He’d wanted her because she was beautiful, because she hated him, because it would piss Miles off, because it would break Rachel at last. Then he spent a month catching the sly humour that sometimes sneaked under the anger, finding the odd places where their love of Miles overlapped, and feeling the soft, warmth of her against him as they slept.

 

He raked his thumb roughly over the head of his cock, and thought about the soft, round warmth of her ass nudging against his crotch some mornings. Tough as she was, there was softness in Charlie if you knew where to look.

Monroe came in a wet spill over his knuckles. Done, he sagged back and wiped his hand on the sheet. After a minute he pushed his shoulders off the wall and checked his leg, probing at the raw, neatly stitched edges of the wound. Charlie did good work. It would slow him down for a couple of days, but it was nothing he couldn’t push through.

Lifting his hips off the mattress, he pulled his jeans up over aching thighs and a tender cock.

Charlie didn’t hate him. She just thought she hated him, but Monroe knew hate. It didn’t toss a blanket over you when you drunk yourself sloppy, or trust you at its back in a fight. Charlie blamed him - Monroe thought that might be worse.

 

A week later, Monroe had changed his mind. They definitely hated each other.

By the end of the first day, the snow had reached the windows. By that evening it was halfway up the side of the cabin, leaking cold through the narrow slats of the shutters. The inside of the cabin smelled of sweat, smoke, and charred horsemeat. It was so cold that there was frost on the inside of the walls, and you had to be practically sitting in the embers of the fire to feel any heat. There was nowhere to go to get away from each other, and they were barely good enough enemies to share the great outdoors.

So far they’d avoided chewing into the raw meat of their grudges - stealing Miles, killing a few family members - and stuck to the petty immediacies of their situation: who burned the horsemeat, why he used so much wood in the fire. It was only a matter of time, though.

Chunk. Chunk. Chunk.

Or - if Charlie didn’t stop stabbing the goddamn floor- he’d just kill her now and avoid it.

Monroe folded the corner of a page down in the old Stephen King they’d found in the bog, and twisted around to glare at her back. She was hunched over, carving grooves into the planks.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

She didn’t bother to look around. ‘Trying to work out what day it is,’ she said. ‘Between all the times I got knocked unconscious and tied up, hunting you...I kind of lost track.’

Idly interested, Monroe dropped the book onto the rug and shifted around to look over her shoulder. His leg throbbed sullenly, and he rubbed the cramped muscle with the heel of his hand. Charlie still wasn’t looking at him, but she tapped one mark with the tip of her knife.

‘That was when I found you in New Vegas,’ she said. ‘I think it’s the 16th?’

He grunted and counted up from there, tallying up the days they’d been travelling together. It didn’t quite add up. Reaching over her shoulder, he took the knife off her and scored a line through the last set of marks. Her body was tucked neatly into the curve of his side, her hair soft against his cheek.

‘You were off by a week,’ he said. ‘That’s home-schooling for you, I suppose.’

‘We had a school,’ she said. ‘Despite the time the militia tried to burn it down. If you’re right...it’s the 23rd? That’s nearly Christmas.’

He shrugged and sat back, keeping the knife. ‘Christmas is for children, Charlie. I think we both know, there’s no such thing as a season of goodwill in this world.’

For once, she didn’t have a comeback. He thought she’d forgotten about it, filed it away with the rest of the fairy stories people told kids.

She hadn’t.

A wash of needle-spiked cold woke him up the next morning. He swore and reached for Charlie, planning to hug her closer like a hot water bottle. Instead he found empty sheets and, when he lifted his head, he saw Charlie dragging a whole, ratty tree in through the door. She was wearing his hoodie over her clothes, which gave his cock a twitch of possessive interest, and her hair was matted into frosty dreadlocks against her shoulders.

‘I told you,’ he rasped sleepily. ‘I didn’t use that much wood on the fire.’

Charlie kicked the door shut and straightened up, pushing the hoodie off with the back of her arm. The cold had pinked her face, making her nose and cheeks flush.

‘It’s not for firewood,’ she said, propping the tree up in the corner. It was lopsided, half naked, and dropping bugs onto the floor. Charlie stamped on a scuttling beetle before it could escape and gave Monroe a defiant look. ‘It’s a Christmas tree.’

He propped himself up his elbow, and gave the tree a sceptical look. ‘It’s a growth spurt off being a weed, Charlie.’

She ignored him - pointedly - and emptied a rat’s treasure of scavenged, sparkly things out of her pack onto the floor. Monroe watched her for a second, then shrugged to himself. Cabin fever could take worse forms, he supposed. He rolled out of bed, dragging the blankets with him, and headed for the fire and his book. While he read, Charlie painstakingly cut decorations out of old CDs and tied strips and tatters of old velvet and silk into ragged garlands for the tree.

‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘It looks like Christmas at the Wombles.’

Charlie turned sharply away from the tree, cocking her head to the side. ‘Was that a ‘you’re not Miles’ reference, or an ‘old person’ reference.’

His pride flinched - a bit - but he refused to let her know that. ‘Both.’

She shrugged and went back to the tree, standing on her tiptoes to twist the paper-clip star into place on top. Monroe watched the flex of her ass under skin-tight denim, then cursed himself and looked away. She was Miles’ niece - at least, his niece - and Rachel’s kid. Both of them already had enough reason to hit Monroe, he didn’t need to help them with more.

‘Why are you even doing this?’ he asked. ‘I know you’re not naive to try and pull a Grinch on me. My heart isn’t going to grow two sizes.’

‘I know it’s hard to hear,’ Charlie said, ‘but this is not about you. Not really.’

Which meant it was. That interested Monroe enough to put his book down. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Tell me what it is about.’

‘It’s about Christmas,’ Charlie said. ‘This is what you do at Christmas, you decorate a tree and try and get on with the people you’re stuck with until Boxing Day.’

Old ghosts jabbed him, his sisters squealing and running around the house on Christmas morning, his parents in cringeworthy Christmas sweaters, and some Christmas special on the TV, and he curled his lip. ‘Christmas is about drinking enough to forget it’s Christmas, until it’s not Christmas anymore,’ he said sourly.

Charlie stepped back from the sad, spangled tree to admire it, wiping her sap sticky hands on her hips.  He glared at her back.

‘I don’t do Christmas, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Not with you.’

‘Oh god, don’t tell me, Miles spoiled Christmas forever when he left?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘Look, Bassy No Mates, you can stand in the corner and face the wall till the 26th for all I care. I’m having Christmas.’

The flash of rage caught him by surprise. He was up off the ground and had her hair wrapped around his fist before the bit of his brain that was trying to be smart caught up with the rest of him.

‘You. Don’t. Talk. To me. Like. That,’ he ground out, pulling her head back so she was looking at him. ‘I cut you a lot of slack, Charlotte, and I don’t want to hurt you. But I’m not Jason Neville or Miles, I’m not charmed by your-’

She punched him in the thigh, grinding her knuckles into the hole. Pain flared, cramping up into his balls, and the leg went from under him. He hooked Charlie down with him, scuffling with her on the floor until he got her pinned under him. She strained against him, the tendons in her wrists tight against his fingers and her hips squirming under him in a way that was going to be distracting the minute the pain in his leg died down to a dull roar.

‘Charlie-’ he thumped her wrists against the ground. ‘Enough.’

She went still under him, all breathless and frustrated. Monroe leaned his weight on her arms, and thought about how easy it would be. Charlie wasn’t a virgin, but she wasn’t that experienced either. He could tell that from when she looked, and when she got flustered and looked away.

She’d never had a hate-fuck, never felt the sick rush of fucking someone that you wanted to fuck over. Or that wanted to fuck you over.

Monroe had. All that anger in those blue eyes had to go somewhere, and if he wasn’t going to fight her then her body would make do with fucking. All he had to do was kiss her, shove his hand between her legs and…

He shoved himself off her with an aggrieved snarl. Miles would never forgive him. Charlie would never forgive him - and he was surprised that that kind of mattered too.

‘Do what you want.’

It was probably his imagination that her ragged exhale was a little disappointed. ‘I was going to anyhow.’

He snorted and got up, stamping his feet into his boots. ‘I’m going to get some wood we can actually put on the fire,’ he said. ‘Enjoy decking the hall.’

As he stalked out of cabin, he heard Charlie start singing ‘tis the season to be jolly’ with off-key enthusiasm.

 

It was still snowing. The wall of white ice that filled the air that first day had turned into a fine, atmospheric drift of snow flakes, but it could turn on the flip of a coin and the cold was still brutal. It did a better job than a cold shower of putting his cock back in its place.  

Monroe wished his brain was that easily controlled. Despite everything, he couldn’t stop thinking about Charlie’s sad little Christmas as he staggered through the knee deep snow. They were ragged, scavenged festivities from a bandit’s scabby den, and it was still better than any Christmas he’d had for the last five years.

He chopped wood until he’d sweated himself warm and his hands were raw, the splintered handle of the axe finding its way between the calluses. The wind had picked up, tossing the snow sideways at him. The blade chopped through the last log of wood, digging into the stump he’d been using as a block. Monroe kicked the loose wedge of wood with the rest, and leaned on the handle of the axe.

‘Deck the halls with boughs of holly,’ he rasp-sang to himself.

It sounded stupid, a bastard howling at the black of his own nature. Monroe knew what he’d done, he knew what he deserved and what he didn’t.

Still, he pushed himself up off the axe, it was Christmas. What harm was there in indulging Charlie? It might save them killing each other if they were stuck together in the cabin much longer. Besides, he needed her on-side when they got to where they were going.

Yeah, that worked. He could have his Christmas and save his cynicism for later.

  



	3. Chapter 3

Everyone talked about how much better Christmas had been back in the old days, when they’d had lights, and TV specials, and all the toys known to man. Charlie didn’t remember it. Not really. There were a few snapshots of presents and the sticky-candy sweetness of peppermint, but nothing cohesive.

All she knew was that they’d always celebrated Christmas, even when they’d not had much. There had been buckets of scrumpy freezing on porches, bags of spiced nuts and sticky lumps of honey balls, whatever toys their dad had tried to bodge together for them. Even after he got together with Maggie, and nobody could be in the same room for over an hour without fighting, everyone had made an effort at Christmas.

Sometimes, admittedly, it was only because they were snowed in and had no choice. Still…last year had been the first year she skipped Christmas. Danny had been dead, her mother had been gone, and Miles had been aggressively, performatively drunk when he wasn’t killing people. Charlie hadn’t been any better, mind you, but it just hadn’t seemed like there was a point to Christmas anymore. She’d spent it drunk in a bar in Georgia, and broke two knuckles in a fight that she didn’t remember.

It was hard to have much Christmas spirit, when all you wanted was Monroe’s head on a spike. Except, all revenge had gotten her was a dead brother, a dead friend, and issues she didn’t want to think about with the family she had left.

So this year was going to be different. Well, it would be if miseryguts stopped whining and let it happen. Otherwise she’d see if his head on a pike might actually make her feel better. After the temper tantrum he’d pulled earlier, that was a tempting thought.

Charlie snorted to herself and finished tying the wreath of dried berries and ivy to the rusted curtain pole over the window. She hopped off the stool and stepped back to admire the effect, putting her hands on her hips. It smelled green and damp, and it sagged in the middle, but it would do.

The door slammed open, blowing in Monroe on a gust of snow and icy wind. He wrestled it shut behind him and tossed the bag of logs onto the ground.

‘Right,’ he said, scrubbing his hands together. He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘So are we setting a limit on Christmas presents, or we just throwing caution to the winds and risking seeing how much we really like each other?’

It was probably the closest thing to an apology Monroe had managed for the last fifteen years. Charlie studied him for a second, then shrugged. ‘How about whatever we can find in a bandit’s cabin?’

Monroe rolled his eyes in dry mockery. ‘Jesus, you’re high maintenance, Charlotte.’

She bit her lip, not quite ready to let him get away with making her laugh yet. ‘Bite me, Monroe.’

He stopped her before she could go back to hanging her half-frozen garlands of ivy. ‘Charlie, one condition. You call me Bass.’

It sounded important, the way he said it. Charlie hesitated, but she couldn’t see how it mattered. She’d already got too used to him to be able to kill him without feeling guilty about it. Maybe she’d have to one day, she couldn’t trust him, but it wouldn’t sit easy with her.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Bass. Happy?’

His mouth sloped up in a faded, sketch of a smile. ‘I wouldn’t want to spoil your Christmas.’

It was a stupid day. They piled firewood in the hearth till the cabin was swelter hot, and hung greenery off every hook and ledge they could find. Monroe found candles somewhere and tied them to the tree in place of lights.

Charlie took her bow and went out in the snow, hunched over against the wind and swearing at the notion that had sent her hunting. She came back with a turkey.

‘It’s a pigeon,’ Monroe said.

‘It’s a small turkey.’

‘Really small, considering it’s a pigeon.’

‘It’s close enough,’ Charlie said firmly, shedding her snow-weighted layers and handing him the sad, dead bird. ‘I caught it, you cook it.’

He grimaced and dropped the corpse onto a table. ‘Do you think if I had any life skills, I’d have been breaking faces in New Vegas to survive?’

‘Rather than work for a living?’ Charlie asked dryly. ‘Yes. Pluck the little turkey, Bass.’

He laughed, a rough rasp of noise, and sat down on the stool she’d been using earlier to start stripping the feathers. The barred fluff gathered in a pile around his feet. Charlie hunched down in front of the fire, holding her hands out to try and heat her sludgey blood up.

‘There is something I’ve been wanting to ask you,’ he said. ‘Why were you roaming the Plains Nation on your own? I can’t believe Miles was ok with that.’

Charlie flexed her fingers and pulled them back from the heat, bracing her elbows on her knees. ‘I love my family, I always have, but I’ve spent most of my life dreaming about getting away from them,’ she said. The admission caught in her throat like thorns - but what did Monroe care that she was a shit? ‘Miles kept talking about us being home, and what we’d be doing this time next year. I was angry with my mum, I was angry with him, and I could see my life rolling out in front of me. There were a lot of cow asses and turnips involved.’

‘So you ran?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘And Miles?’

‘Rachel needed him.’

She tried - very hard - to keep her voice neutral, empty of any of the barbs that lurked down that particular pit. Maybe not hard enough.

‘Yeah, well, that’s Miles for you,’ Monroe said dryly.

Tension coiled between Charlie’s shoulders, making her spine ache, as she anticipated Monroe’s next words. However angry she was at Rachel, she was still her mother and Monroe didn’t get to insult her. Not after everything.

Except, for once, Monroe didn’t pour oil on the flames. He just finished what he was doing in silence. When he was done, he bagged the bird and hung it out to dry overnight. Sitting down next to Charlie on the mat, a respectable distance between them, he stared into the flames. The light from it gilded his face, picking out the elegant bones and the pale streaks in his sandy hair.

‘When I was a kid, my mom and dad had a party every Christmas Eve,’ he said, making Charlie twitch as she caught herself staring. ‘Half the street would be there, Miles and I would steal pocketfuls of pigs in blankets and the dregs of the cocktails.’

‘Miles spent Christmas with you?’ Charlie asked. ‘When you were kids?’

Monroe glanced over at her, eyebrows raising slightly. ‘Of course. We’ve been friends since we were kids. Brothers. Besides, he was hardly going to spend it at home with…’

He trailed off, twisting his mouth around an old memory. Curiosity tweaked at Charlie. Dad had never talked about his family, any stories of grandparents had been cozy cookies and homely Thanksgivings with the Porters.

‘No one ever talks about them,’ she said. ‘Dad didn’t. Miles doesn’t, even when he’s drunk.’

‘Yeah. There’s a reason for that,’ Monroe said. ‘What about you? What was Christmas Eve like in the armpit of my Republic?’

Grief and anger mixed together tasted like acid on the back of Charlie’s tongue. She bit her cheek, squelching the knee jerk retort.

‘Nice, Monroe’ she said. ‘When I ask Miles, he just tells me I don’t need to know. You just detour it right into a fight.’

‘I thought you were going to call me Bass?’

‘I thought you weren’t going to be an asshole.’

He looked down, rubbing his thumb over his lower lip, and shrugged. ‘I never actually agreed to that, I’m just going along with the Christmas thing.’

‘Ben always opened the house up to anyone in need,’ Charlie said, answering his question as if he’d meant it. ‘Used to drive me mad, because we never had enough, but there was Aaron and Maggie’s patients and… Guess he picked it up from your mom and dad - think they’d have been proud of him?’

Monroe picked up a charred stick and leaned forward to poke the fire, stirring the embers to make them spark. ‘They were dead, Charlie, so they weren't much of anything. I’m sure your Dad’s generosity made up for him ending the world though.’

It was strange. What Rachel had done, the role she’d played, had become part of her idea of her mother. Rachel Matheson, who made terrible cupcakes, released spiders out windows, and had nearly destroyed the world. That was just who she was.

With Ben, it was always a cold shock as if she’d forgotten somehow.

‘Do you think it would have been easier if I’d known?’ she asked, hunching in on herself and wrapping her arms around her knees. ‘Would it have hurt less when he died?’

Monroe shoved the stick all the way into the fire and sat back, picking absently at blistered skin on his palms. ‘I don't know,’ he said. ‘It never seemed to make it any easier for Miles to kill me.’

The maudlin mood settled like the snow outside, both of them sitting in a bubble of their own misery as the fire burned down. Charlie finally shook it off, rolling her shoulders back, and used Monroe’s shoulder as a brace to stand up.

‘This was going to be your present tomorrow,’ she said. ‘So Merry Christmas, General.’

She’d found the bottles earlier, stashed in a shallow runnel of chilled water at the far end of the little compound. Once she’d scraped the sludge of ice off the top what was left smelled like sweet apple rot and was the bitter yellow of dehydrated urine. It also had a high enough alcohol content to make your eyes burn just breathing it in.

Charlie thought about getting mugs, but didn’t bother in the end. She took a swig, squinting as the burn made her sweat, and offered him the bottle.

‘Booze,’ he said, toasting her with it before hammering down a gulp. ‘You know me so well, Charlotte.’

‘Please,’ she said, flopping back down bonelessly. ‘Like drinking the sad away isn’t a Matheson tradition.’

Monroe gave a dry laugh and shifted, stretching his leg out in front of him. He rubbed his thigh absently, pressing the heel of his hand into the muscle, and took another drink.

‘What’s this all about anyhow, Charlie?’ he asked, waving the bottle at the decorations and the wilting tree. ‘And why do you care if I wouldn’t get on the Once in Royal David’s City express?’

‘I guess, because you spent all those Christmases with Miles,’ she said. His sceptical look made her shrug. ‘I don’t know what we are, Monroe-’

‘Bass,’ he corrected her.

‘Fine. Bass. We’re not enemies - not right now, not until next time - but we suck at being anything else. I suppose I thought this -’ she mirrored his gesture around the cabin ‘- would make it easier to work together, to do the Miles thing.’

‘You’re not Miles,’ Monroe said.

Charlie snorted at him. ‘Neither are you.’

‘Good,’ Monroe said, putting the bottle down. ‘Otherwise this would be weird.’

He cupped the back of her neck, twisting her hair around his fist, and kissed her. It wasn’t sweet or tentative, Monroe kissed like he knew what he wanted. Almost cruel, his mouth scraped over hers with hungry, apple-sour intensity and his fingers flexing hard against the nape of her neck.

Given the choice, Charlie didn’t know if she’d have kissed him back or not. It was taken out of her hands when Monroe pulled back from her. His eyes were heavy lidded and hoar-frost pale, cold so sharp it burned.

‘That’s what we are,’ he said, voice thick with control. ‘That’s what I want from you. That’s why this isn’t ever going to be easy, or comfortable.’

She took a shaky breath - too close to him, she realised, the air tasted like lust and Monroe - and put her hand on his chest. The beat of his heart thumped against her palm - proof, she supposed, that he did have one after all.

‘We can’t. Miles-’

‘I know that,’ Monroe said. ‘Still what I want.’

He didn’t ask. If he had, Charlie would probably have lied. Instead, she ran her hand over the hard lines of his body to his shoulder. As General Monroe he’d been lean, but New Vegas had scraped him down to bone and muscle.

‘The hell with it,’ she said.

This time she kissed him, her hand twisting in his shirt to pull him closer. He resisted for a second, and she thought he was going to ask if she was sure. He thought better of it, leaning into the kiss instead. Apparently Miles wasn’t the only founder of the Republic who was good at strategy.

‘Just this once,’ Charlie mumbled against his mouth, lips grazing the rough stubble of his beard. ‘Get it out of our system.’

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Monroe supposed he should tell Charlie that wasn’t going to happen. In his experience - and he’d too damn much experience screwing women he shouldn’t - scratching this itch only made it worse. The only thing worse than wanting what you couldn’t have, was knowing what you couldn’t have.

Except he wasn’t a good man, and he had  certainly never been that good a man.

Charlie kissed like she did everything else, determined and enthusiastic. Her hand twisted in his shirt and she crawled into his lap. The firm curve of her ass pressed against his cock and he swore into the damp of her mouth.

He wanted to roll them over and fuck her on the floor, make her beg for him with that generous, sweet mouth that made his name a curse word. He wanted to take her to the bed - aired out of the stink of bandits - and make love to her long, slow, and sweet, so that in ten years time she’d still blush at the memory of it.

Charlie apparently favoured the fucking on the floor option. She pushed him down onto the rug, biting kisses along his jaw and tugging at his belt with impatient fingers. Her hair trailed over his face, catching in his mouth and trailing over his throat.

Fumbling the buckle of the belt again, Charlie cursed against his throat and pushed herself up. She sat back on his thighs, frowning in concentration, and worked his jeans open. Slim, callused fingers brushed the taut skin over his stomach, making his breath hitch sharply in his chest, as she tugged the age-worn denim down over his thighs.

His cock was already halfway to hard, thickening eagerly under Charlie’s attention. She bit her lip, folding the stubble-flush curve of her mouth between her teeth, and ran her thumb down his groin and along the shaft.

Monroe’s hips jerked up off the ground, sensation clenching sweetly down his taint. His reaction made Charlie smirk, the same, smug curl of her lips when she insulted him.

‘You know,’ she said. ‘This is only fair, I have already paid for you.’

He ran both hands along her thighs, thumbs tracing the inside of her thighs. His hands cupped her hips, squeezing hard enough she’d know it was him, and his thumbs pressed against the crotch of her jeans. She took a breath, her breasts pressing against the too-thin fabric of her too-small t-shirt, and squirmed.

‘Paid for me?’ he said, pressing harder. Charlie made a small, choked sound in her throat and shifted her hands to his wrists. ‘You were the blonde in New Vegas?’

‘You hadn’t put that together?’

Monroe’s mouth slanted slowly. ‘To be honest, I figured it was just the bounty hunter.’

She laughed and raised herself up her knees, unbuttoning her jeans and wriggling the skin tight denim down her thighs. The soft curls at the crux of her thighs were already wet, before he even properly touched her.

‘I doubt he had the cash,’ she said, pulling her t-shirt up over her head. ‘You didn’t come cheap, Jimmy, and I was not satisfied.’

He hooked his finger in the front of her bra and pulled her down, licking the faint spray of freckles on her shoulder. ‘You were going to kill me right?’

She held up one hand, thumb and forefinger squeezed together. ‘This close.’

Monroe tucked his hand between her thighs, thumb in the fold of her thigh and his fingers probing into her tight, wet body. ‘That close?’

Charlie rocked back against his fingers, the low, caught noise in her throat hitting all the right buttons for Monroe. Her eyes squeezed closed, the expression on her face so raw Monroe almost felt bad for looking.

Almost.

‘Charlie?’

‘Uh huh?’

‘How?’

Her eyes opened, the pupils huge and dreamy. ‘You want to talk about that now?’

He moved his hand, fingers slipping deeper and the heel of his hand just grazing her clit. Not enough for her, judging by the whimper. Maybe it was twisted to be turned on by the thought of her trying to kill him - but if he was going to die, he’d rather be at a Matheson’s hand. It would be a sort of immortality. He knew Miles - he knew Charlie - well enough to know that his death would stay with them.

‘Tell me.’

She licked her lips, tongue curling across the pink curve. ‘I was going to shoot you,’ she said. ‘I nearly did shoot you.’

He remembered the lick of air against his throat and the thunk of an arrow. At the time, he’d been preoccupied.

‘No confrontation?’ he asked, fingers curling inside her to press at the taut, wet slick of her body. The long muscles in Charlie’s stomach tightened under her tanned skin. ‘No condemnation? No saying your piece? Doesn’t sound like a Matheson to me.

‘Sometimes I think my family talk too much,’ Charlie said. She leaned over, the supple bend of her body making Monroe’s mouth dry, and kissed his lower lip. ‘They definitely let you talk too much. Every time you’re dead to rights, someone let’s you open your mouth and next thing you know…’

He caught her chin with his free hand, trying to read the expression on her face. Grief, anger, resentment - nothing he didn’t see when he looked at himself in the mirror, nothing that stopped her pupils swelling with lust when he stroked his thumb over her lower lip.

‘Not scot free,’ he said. ‘You take your pound of flesh, you Mathesons.’

A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. ‘Good.’ She wrapped her hand around his cock, fingers squeezing the thick shaft and her thumb butting up against the head of his cock. He made a strangled noise, biting his lower lip hard, and she twisted her head free. A damp, hot kiss pressed against his palm. ‘I want a pound that’s worth a handful of diamonds.’

A handful? Monroe tucked that away to growl over later, his cut hadn’t been of a handful of anything. He slid his hand out of her, the wet walls of her sex tightening around his fingers in protest, and hitched his hips up to shove his jeans the rest of the way off. Charlie shifted over him, breasts shifting in distracting ways in the thin bra. Her nipples pressed against the cotton, hard and shades darker than the skin around them.

Monroe leaned up, hooking one arm around her waist, and caught one of the hard buds in his mouth. He pinched it between his teeth, biting down just enough to make her gasp, and sucked wetly at the tender flesh. Charlie hissed, dragging the sound in between her teeth, and grabbed the back of his head. Long fingers twisted in his short cropped curls, nails digging into his scalp.

Wet cotton and the salt of Charlie’s skin against his tongue. His cock was throbbing with the need to be in Charlie. He kicked the jeans the rest of the way off and tightened his arm around Charlie’s hip, ready to roll them both over. Charlie tugged his head back by his hair, a smile curving her lips as she looked down at him.

‘Uh-uh,’ she said. ‘I paid, remember? I get to call the shots.’

Monroe raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you even know the shots, Charlotte?’ he asked.

She shoved him back down to the floor, shoulders hitting the rug, and bent down to kiss him - hard and with teeth. Sitting back, she stripped her bra off. His spit slicked the pale skin of one, the nipple dark pink and puckered.

‘I think I can string something together,’ she said, sliding her hands under his shirt. Her nails scratched his chest, dragging over his nipples. ‘Given a few minutes.’

Monroe stripped his shirt over his head, leaving it on the floor. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen your battle plans.’

Her eyes narrowed at that, a flicker of temper making the blue spark. ‘You’re such a dick.’

‘I’ve got-’

She kissed him, hard and with teeth. Monroe grinned through the sharp copper tang of blood, and bit back. It was never going to be easy between them, but since when had easy been worth the effort? He rolled them over, ignoring the twist of a growl under his mouth, and slid down her body. The first swipe of his tongue made her yelp, twisting her fingers into his his hair.

The surprise in her voice made him lower his guess about how much experience she’d had. Not necessary the quantity, but definitely the quality.

He pressed his mouth against the wet folds of her sex, flicking his tongue against her clitoris. Her nails dug into his scalp as she gasped his name and squirmed under him. The long muscles in her thighs flexed and tightened as she lifted her hips up off the ground. He slung an arm over her stomach, thumb hooked over her hipbone, and explored her with lips and tongue.

Charlie made it easy. Her body tightened when he was doing it right, his name caught on her tongue between gasps and her fingers flexing like a cat against his scalp. His tongue traced patterns on slick skin, dipping inside her with hard, wet jabs that made her jerk and clench.

She came with a ragged curse and his name, pleasure jolting through her body like a shock. It tasted like salt and musk on Monroe’s tongue. When it was done, she sprawled out bonelessly under him, panting softly as the flush faded from her breasts and stomach.

Monroe crawled up her body, arms braced on either side of her shoulders, and watched her blink and struggle to focus with satisfaction. Her tongue swiped over her lips and she squinted at him.

‘Bass?’ she said, voice cracking in her throat. The sound of his name on her tongue made Monroe’s cock twitch eagerly. He kissed her shoulder and smirked.

‘Yeah?’

‘Still not worth a handful of diamonds,’ she said.

He pressed a wet, hot kiss to her ear, murmuring ‘liar’ to her.

‘Prove it.’

Monroe thought he could do that. He thrust into her, burying himself inside her with one hard thrust. She was slick and tight, aftershocks from her orgasm clenching around his cock.

‘Asshole,’ she gasped, wrapping her legs around him. Her heels dug into his thighs and she arched under him, burying him deeper inside her.

‘Charlotte,’ he said, giving her name the same lilt.

She snorted - now that was an interesting sensation when his cock was inside her - and ran her hands down his back. Her curious fingers found the scars on his back, the shiny dollop where he’d caught a piece of a tank after an explosion and the rough grate of road-rash from a bad bet with Miles when they were kids.

Monroe bit the sharp line of her jaw, working bruises down her throat with teeth and lips, and thrust into her. She gasped, fingers clenching in the hard rise of muscle, and threw her head back. The bare line of her throat, stretched out taut and stained red from his mouth, made him groan.

Charlie was wire taut and squirming under him, gasping in air that tasted of him each time he thrust into her. He palmed her breast in one hand, the rough scrape of his fingers making her hiss and arch up into his touch.  

His balls felt heavy, aching with dull heat, and the rake of Charlie’s nails over his back pulled them tighter to his body. One last thrust, burying his cock as deep inside her as he could, and he pulled out. He came over his knuckles and Charlie’s stomach, his orgasm clenching in his gut like black electricity in his nerve endings.

Charlie had watched him come, now she slid her own hand down between her thighs. The graze of her fingers over sensitive flesh made her groan, biting the inside of her lip. Monroe shifted to the side so he could watch.

‘Do you want to use my hand?’ he asked, the words sounding rough in his throat.

The idea made Charlie flush from her nipples to her hairline, her eyes going huge with surprise. She spluttered for a second, tripping over her own tongue.

‘I don’t know what…’

He laid his hand low on her stomach, watching her muscles quiver in reaction. ‘I want to see how you get off,’ he said. ‘Show me.’

Charlie hesitated for a second, long enough that when she did rest her hand over his he thought she was going to shove it away. She had slender, practical hands - with white thread scars on her fingers from sword tips and fletchings - that were much smaller than Monroe’s. He admired the contrast as she guided her hand down between his legs, guiding his fingers inside her and pressing his thumb just there and just hard enough.

Knuckle deep in Charlie, her hand clenching around his as she came for a second time, Monroe watched her face as the orgasm crashed over her. She twisted her mouth just before she came, folding her top lip between her teeth and frowning like it was a test she might get wrong. He wanted…

Too much. Even he knew that. If they’d just met, if there hadn’t been a train’s worth of luggage parked outside the cabin, it’d have been too much. As it was, he knew he was never going to get close to it.

So. He’d take what he could get, and fuck the cost.

‘Miles is going to kill us,’ he said, sprawling out next to her. They were both sweaty and sticky, ripe with sex, and the heat from the fire was losing the fight with the winter. He thought idly about moving, but not hard enough to actually shift.

‘Miles is never going to know,’ Charlie said. ‘And he’d kill you, not me.’

She was probably right. Monroe stretched, feeling the scars you couldn’t see pull and drag at his muscles.

‘True,’ he said. ‘But you’d have to live with him being disappointed with you for the rest of your life. Disappointed and disapproving. Never tells you why. Just-’

Charlie slapped his stomach, the sharp sting of heat making him twitch. He glared at her, she shrugged.

‘You’re getting maudlin,’ she said, sitting up. ‘And just for tonight, I don’t want to remember why I should hate you. OK. Just, for one night, be some dude I picked up and banged to keep the cold out.’

The curve of her back was smooth, all tawny lines and the knobbled dip of her spine. Monroe ran his finger down the line of it, from shoulder blade to the small of her back.

‘You never forgot why you hated me, Charlie,’ he said. ‘We both know that’s not what this is.’

She bolted, shying away from his touch and going to hide under the blankets. He’d known she would - but it didn’t make what he’d said any less true. Hate someone enough, and it was almost like love. Love someone enough, and it was almost like hate.

Ask Miles.

Monroe tidied up, then he crawled into bed with Charlie. Not the first bed they’d shared. The first time since they’d not had a layer of denim and deniability between Charlie’s ass and his hard on. He wondered if Charlie really thought they could go back to pretending neither of them noticed his cock or the way she came back from her morning walks with flushed cheeks and the smell of sex.

Probably not. She had her flaws - her inability to see the grey in anything for a start - but self-delusion was Monroe’s party trick, not Charlie’s.

Curled up in their looted bed - the polite distance maintained shrinking as the cold snuck under the blankets - Charlie dragged up a sigh from her toes.

‘This hasn’t changed anything,’ she said. Her shoulders shifted in what he assumed was a shrug. ‘It can’t.’

‘Of course,’ Monroe said. ‘After Christmas is over, things can just go back to normal.’

Even if the dim light of the fire he could see her sceptical, sidelong look. Then she snorted - making the point she’d seen through him - and let the statement pass unchallenged. With the unspoken permission given, Monroe pulled Charlie the last few inches so was tucked up against his body.

‘Merry Christmas, Charlotte,’ he said.

  
  



End file.
